My most thoughtful thoughts — the ones I take substantial time to craft — are currently going into a newsletter that I started in January 2023 on the Substack platform. In some ways it’s a reboot of my old webjournal Nine Lives, though I think age and wisdom also makes it a somewhat different beast. For more details about that, see my announcement blog post.
I also have decades of short stories, essays, and personal journals in my past, most of which is out-of-print or no longer online, but I’m working on selectively making some of it accessible again. Watch this space for changes.
Fiction
I have returned to fiction writing after a gap of almost two decades, and while most of my attention is going to my debut novel, I did pause briefly to write a new short story. “Hope Is the Thing With Feathers” is about a young autistic person and some genetically engineered corvids, and will appear in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in the July/August 2023 issue (available on newsstands in mid-June).
One of my earlier stories, an original fairy tale called “The Shell Box”, was published (alongside such luminaries as Robin McKinley, Patricia McKillip, and Neil Gaiman) in the anthology Silver Birch, Blood Moon, which has been rereleased as a Kindle ebook.
My novelette “Of Silence and Slow Time”, originally published in 1995, was reprinted in 2012 in the Gallaudet University Press collection Outcasts and Angels: The New Anthology of Deaf Characters in Literature. In 2022, it was the subject of a chapter entitled “Reproductive and Disability Justice: Deaf Peoples’ Right to Be Born” in The Palgrave Handbook of Reproductive Justice and Literature.
Non-Fiction
My unscientific canvassing suggested that for short fiction sales, which are unagented, most authors simply sign whatever contract the publisher offers them. This is not great! So I wrote an article for the SFWA blog with some practical advice about “Negotiating Your Short Fiction Contracts”.
I’ve written some more formal essays on the Medium platform. Many are on the general topic of my experiences as a late-recognized Autistic, and they are collected in my zine re-Cognition.
The other essays are:
- Career Advice for Cats and Foxes
- We Should Care More About Campaign Finance
- Toward a Spiral of Sound
The original vows that my partner Jak and I co-wrote for our wedding are also posted there, released into the public domain for anyone to adapt or draw inspiration from.
Encouraged by a journalist friend, in 2012 I tested out the idea of pivoting to writing real journalism with a piece for Fortune magazine. It was a fascinating learning experience, but I didn’t end up going that direction. The archives are now sadly behind a paywall, but if you happen to have a subscription, you can read “Salary negotiation: Everything you’ve been told is wrong”.